Every now and then there comes along a television show that captures the contemporary mood perfectly. Fans of the US hit Curb your Enthusiasm, will testify to the comedy genius of Larry David, the New York Jewish writer who invented the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld, and now appears in this show ostensibly about his own life. David lives an idyllic life in Los Angeles with his wife, but every day seems to be fraught with danger as he rubs up against the sensitivities of other people. Although fundamentally a decent guy, David regularly manages to offend almost everyone: black people, women, the disabled, lesbians, and other Jews.

What makes the comedy so funny (and so believable) is the constant friction produced by the idea of ‘tolerance’. We know that LA – the heart of liberal Hollywood – is the home of political correctness. People get so easily offended, even when a person’s intentions are clearly good, yet ironically, the easily-offended are the most intolerant people around. In one episode, while David is whistling Wagner outside the cinema one evening, a fellow Jew comes up and berates him angrily (‘Do you know they played that in the concentration camps?’). In another episode his agent’s Jewish parents, overhear him calling his wife ‘Hitler’ and become very upset with him. As his friend later explains, they are quite emotional because their gay cousin escaped Nazi Germany (‘A gay Jewish guy in Nazi Germany?’ notes David, ‘That’s gotta be tough).

It is this prevalence of the concept of tolerance and the tensions that it creates that Brown traces in her book. Regulating Aversion charts the rise of ‘tolerance talk’ since the 1980s, promoted by state institutions, supra-national organisations such as the UN, non-governmental bodies, and civic organisations such as churches, schools, and charities. From the highest institutions, to the micro-interaction of every day life, Brown’s shows how tolerance has become a regulatory practice that reifies differences and encourages groups to compete for special protection. To practice tolerance of a minority or cultural sub-group is to proclaim one’s own civilised credentials, whilst maintaining that group’s separation and distinction from onself. When tolerance moves from the realm of private virtue to the political stage, it becomes a recipe for intolerance.

Brown’s approach is to analyse the genealogy of the term ‘tolerance’ – how socio-historical conditions have shaped its usage and application. This avowedly Foucauldian approach yields rich insights into the way the concept is deployed by groups as a strategy of civic organisation and behaviour. For Brown, the surreptitious power of tolerance talk is its disguise as a benevolent, everyday virtue, which goes unchallenged. It is pronounced by groups and individuals freely as a ‘good thing’, without significant need of enforcement or codification. It is considered wise and desirable to be tolerant and live alongside views that are disagreeable. In our regular interactions, this is a necessity as much as a virtue.

However Brown’s method of analysis differs from Foucault’s in that she does not believe ‘governmentality’ - the regulation and formation of subjectivity - is an undetermined process that emerges spontaneously across a scattering of groups. Rather, for Brown it is driven by the state, which pursues tolerance as a form of legitimation, at a moment when naked assertion of its own values is near impossible. Brown asserts that this virtue becomes a legitimation practice for the state to enforce its own cultural and legal norms in the guise of liberalism, without ever allowing the normative foundations of such regulation come under scrutiny. Tolerance acknowledges the beliefs and ideas of another group as things to be protected, whilst at the same time distancing them from the norms of the mainstream. Their difference is ‘cultural’ and lacks rational foundation, hence, it is something to accept but not to engage with.

Brown traces the ‘different’ but ‘indifferent’ thesis to an essential contradiction within liberalism itself. In order to claim superiority over competing cultures and beliefs, liberalism must claim to sit outside culture. Its remarkable achievement has been to enclose religious belief in the private realm, where it can do no conceivable harm to the market economy and bourgeois nation state.

Here she illustrates her point with a deft analysis of the difference between the emancipation struggles of women and Jews in the nineteenth century. The strategy pursued for the former involved a split between women’s public roles and private natures. In public, women asserted themselves as abstract, reasoning individuals, whilst privately they remained essentially ‘different’; feminine, domesticated and nurturing. This meant that formal and legal equality was not as socially disruptive as it would otherwise have been. Women continued to live a subjugated existence in the home, burdened with childcare and domestic chores, but they achieved a formal equality that, in one way at least, transcended this difference. A woman’s difference (and inequality) shifted to the private realm. For Jews, their religious difference could not be accommodated so easily in this private/public framework, because their very difference – their belonging and fealty to a transnational Jewish people - was itself a challenge to the requirements of the nation state. The difference itself was the problem and had to be transformed. For Jews to be emancipated they were required to declare their public citizenship over any other and relegate the importance of their religion to the realm of private culture. Their difference required them to give something up which could not be accommodated into the social order.

The problem with the liberal worldview, Brown argues, is that to relegate culture and belief to the private realm and be ‘tolerant’ of it is also to depoliticise it and rob it of its communal force (one’s beliefs become merely a matter of personal taste, and not to be spread too actively amongst others). She illustrates this rather cannily in the comparison between Martin Luther King’s substantial and inspirational ‘I have a Dream’ with Rodney King’s downgraded and plaintive ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ (It is perhaps unsurprising that Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality in Britain, regularly chooses to repeat the second King’s formulation rather than the first).

Brown’s concern about the depoliticisation of difference, and society’s inability to transcend it with a universal outlook, echoes Matthew Arnold’s trenchant critique of the secular state in the later part of the nineteenth century. In Culture and Anarchy (1882) Arnold saw the state as arbiter between competing viewpoints but unable, ultimately, to assert its own. A society like this, he feared, could have no ‘culture’ anc could not confidently cohere people around a shared moral framework. The moral component of culture would be left to individuals, while society would carry on working according to rational market principles.

About midway through the book, Brown’s writing lifts from the dry prose of a political theorist, to a more passionate and lyrical style. She hits a particularly good riff by chapter four, when she discusses the way differences and inequality have become depoliticised in modern society:

The thinner that public life and citizens’ experience with power and difference grows, the more citizens withdraw into private identities and a perception of fellow citizens as tools or obstacles to their private aims, and the more we appear in need of tolerance as a solution to our differences – a solution that intensifies our estrangement from one another and from public life as a field of engagement with difference.

War and conflict are reduced to people’s intolerance, rather than political divisions borne of social relations. Differences are not to be engaged with, challenged or transcended, they are merely to be tolerated and hence left to exist outside the social order. By the same token, Brown points out that tolerance talk undermines a social analysis of why ideas and convictions emerge. People’s views are treated in an essentialist way – as cultural or even natural, and therefore beyond change and debate.

Brown’s analysis of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, founded in 1993, is a high point in the book because it brings to attention the circuitry of tolerance in practice – its rhetoric, its devices of manipulation and moral control. She describes well the experience of physically moving around the museum, being asked questions to which there are obvious moral answers the visitor is expected to give (‘Is a father in the home, or a presentation by an ex-gang member at a school assembly, important in deterring gang membership?’), and the lazy but deliberate conflation of various conflicts into one big War on Terror – in itself the ultimate nominalisation of a depoliticised conflict. The Museum of Tolerance presents the world’s most awful political moments as simplistic morality tales, from which the visitor is expected to deduce certain conclusions – any deviation is to risk being classed as intolerant.

Brown takes her argument further when she suggests that tolerance has become strategy to practice intolerance, discouraging the formation of cultures premised upon group identity and loyalty contra the state. In the case of American Arabs, this paradox of tolerance and intolerance is particularly notable. This group has been subjected to arrests and detention, intrusive security measures at airports and heightened surveillance; the state ‘engages in extralegal and prosecutorial actions toward the very group it calls upon the citizenry to be tolerant toward’.

When it comes to those who actively reject the nation state model, this intolerance is much more pronounced. Brown suggests it is easier for liberal democracies to accept Islam as long as Muslims maintain the privacy of their practice and not insist on the implementation of sharia. Her argument against this approach is not one of relativism (‘This is their culture, we should respect it’); rather, it is to point out that liberal democracy is recurrently afraid to defend its mode or organisation, laws and norms against any alternative to it, and rather than putting up a fight, it seeks to relegate all alternatives to the safely distant realm of culture. If any group seeks to do more than this and challenge liberal democracy, it is very quickly thrown out of the safety net of tolerance and marked out as ‘barbaric’. Tolerance will only extend to cultural difference, not to existential challenges.

Brown takes issue with the fundamental subject of liberal democracy – the autonomous individual – that exists a priori to society, and is capable of choosing the world and norms to which is subscribes. Whilst this distinction between private and public sphere allows, for the first time, the possibility of autonomous choices and the will to believe or not to believe, Brown believes it has also obscured the ways in which subjects are formed through social liberal democracies, and are themselves ‘cultured’. In this sense, the state’s call to tolerate other people’s deviant or minority culture is a way of affirming the neutrality or ‘culture-less’ character of liberal society. We are outside culture, whilst the sub-group we tolerate is unable to achieve the same level of transcendence.

Brown is right here to point out that the Enlightenment was not culture free and that liberal democracies remain limited in their ability to deliver substantial as well as formative equality. Women in modern America may have legal parity, but they continue to be culturally subjugated in other ways. Yet where Brown loses the reader is in claiming an equivalence between different forms of subjugation – suggesting that women in America are no better off than women in the Middle East, for both are products of a regulatory culture, albeit by different means. Whilst Brown quite rightly attacks the simplistic model of civilised versus barbarian cultures, she does not offer us tools that might allow us to distinguish between certain kinds of freedom and culture. It is not enough to say that everyone is a product of a culture, even us liberals: we need to be able to make judgements about those cultures too.

And here is the problem with Brown’s book. Whilst she shows how tolerance talk is historical and contingent, she gives little direction in how to distinguish between good talk and bad. It may be socially constructed, but is it worth defending according to some more objective criteria that transcend the particularity of private cultures? This is a problem with Foucauldian analyses generally – there is much understanding of how power uses ‘cultural technologies’ to form and shape subjectivity, but little help in deciding which values or principles are worthy of a defence. In short, there is no distinction made between cultural analysis and political theory.

Still, the richness of the book and its adept handling of the material makes this an important read. In tackling the moral certainties around the notion of ‘tolerance’, it hits the heart of our most sacred taboo.